Deb Moller - Get Ready!

My 1949 Cape Codstyle house, with its dark shutters and trimmed shrubs, blends in well: a small house on a quiet street in the slow-paced capital city of Salem, Oregon. Unless, of course, you go snooping under the sofa, where cans of watercarefully placed on their sides in foil trayshide.

My hallways look ordinary, but open the linen closet and only one shelf holds sheets. The other three stock canned goods: hearty soups, baked beans, tuna, beef stew. Pull out the drawers below to reveal N95 masks, six bottles of hand sanitizer, batteries of all sizes, two first-aid manuals for backcountry hikers, extra-large bottles of various pain pills, and packages of heavy-duty contractor garbage bags for lining buckets improvised into toilets. Elsewhere in the house, shelves, cupboards, boxes, and bins are filled with freeze-dried food, first-aid supplies, charcoal briquets, and a camp stove.

What youve found are not the dark secrets of a paranoid doomsday fearer or the stockpile of an agoraphobic homebody, but the preparations of an expert who wants to be ready for the very real threat of a 9.0 Cascadia subduction zone earthquake.

The for what this means), causing severe shaking from west of I-5 to the coast and farther east in some areas. When the shaking starts, well be living in the twenty-first century; when it stops, well be living in the 1850s: no power, water, plumbing, phones, or internet. Few basic public services and limited medical assistance. But our ancestors survived back then, and we can tooif were prepared.

Emergency officials estimate that getting help to everyone will take two weeks or more. Thats why I am two-weeks-readyIm able to meet the needs of my family for fourteen days without outside help. Thats why you should be too.

Preparation is hard to weave into modern life. Like so many before me, I failed time and again to put aside the hours to make the perfect emergency kit, to remember to rotate my food on the perfect schedule, and to make new plans every time anyone in the family changed jobs or schools.

I could tell you that getting ready for a catastrophic earthquake is easy, a just do it proposition. I could tell you that the tips and tricks Ive included here will help you avoid every obstacle along the way. Id love to say I have a magic wand that can get you ready to survive for two weeks in a snap. It would feel good to tell you that. But it wouldnt be true.

There isnt a convenient empty space in your budget, your schedule, or your house just waiting to be filled with getting ready. Youll have to find time, money, and space in a life where all those things are probably already 100 percent (or more) spoken for. I can help you with creative solutions to maximize your time, money, and storage space, but it would be silly to say that adding one more thing to an already busy life is easy. It wont be.

Instead, youll have to consider why it is important to you to prepare, why being prepared is more important than whatever else is competing for your time, money, or space. Everyones answer will be different.

Ive only been involved professionally in emergency management since 2016, when I became the public-private partnerships manager at the Oregon Office of Emergency Management. When I left that job, I started a community-based earthquake preparedness organization called Cascadia Calling, to help people outside the tsunami zone get ready for a 9.0 earthquake. But my decades working in education and social service programs, coupled with my masters degree in applied behavioral science, shape the advice in this book. Those experiences taught me that preparedness, like any big endeavor, is best achieved by starting small, doing a little on a consistent basis rather than a lot once in a while, staying focused, expecting setbacks, having a plan, learning from mistakes, and celebrating progress.

Ive been personally dedicated to being more prepared for the unimaginable since 2001, after the unthinkable happened on my birthdaySeptember 11. It has taken me years to be really prepared for the Cascadia earthquake, and Ive made tons of mistakes. I want to save others from making those same mistakes. I needed a book that covered not just all the must-haves, but was a full guide to getting ready for a devastating natural disaster: a how-to, when-to, and where-to-store-all-these-supplies road map to preparedness. In writing this book, I created the book that I wish Id had: how to be as prepared as possible, in a way that fits my lifeto not let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

This book is designed to help a busy, distracted personsomeone just like meget ready for the Cascadia earthquake. With quick tasks, checklists, and useful tips, this book gives you ways to fit getting prepared into your lifein the kinds of small chunks of time you can carve out. It covers everything you need to know to get ready to be on your own for two weeks after a full-rip 9.0 Cascadia earthquake, and gives you the skills and supplies to help in many other types of natural disasters. It also explains just why this is so important: the first two chapters cover the science and statistics driving the recommendations. If you already know enough about the Really Big One to want to be two-weeks-ready, you can jump right to Chapter Three () and start preparing.